Talk:Otto Jespersen

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A picture of Otto Jespersen

I found three pictures of O. Jespersen here, but I have no idea how copyright laws work. Is there anyone who can explain? yhever 00:47, 24 January 2006 (UTC)[reply]

These are no longer available.--Felix Folio Secundus (talk) 10:59, 19 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

In Biography

Is there any specific sense for ff at 1909ff:? Or a typo? Sibazyun 03:57, 10 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I think the writer means 'and in later years'. The seven volumes were published in 1909, 1914, 1927, 1931, 1940, 1942, and 1949. I've changed the '1909ff' to '1909-49' --gramorak (talk) 12:10, 29 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the suggestion. In other languages, 'ff appears just as in this English edition. I will correct some of them. Sibazyun (talk) 02:53, 4 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Encyclopaedia Britannica author/editor

He is listed in my 1951 (14th ed.) copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as the author of an article of central importance within the field of linguistics: "Language." Would this be worth mentioning in his bio here? 97.82.251.9 (talk) 18:35, 13 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The Great Vowel Shift

It should probably be mentioned somewhere that he was the first to study the Great Vowel Shift, and that he also coined the term. (ref ) I have not checked the source. 95.155.201.41 (talk) 12:02, 11 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I would strongly doubt that he was the first to study something whose existence has been fairly obvious since at least the eighteenth century to many people who have been struck by the fact that the written vowel letters a, e, i etc. are often pronounced very differently in English vs. many continental European languages... AnonMoos (talk) 10:43, 12 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

AnonMoos, doubt comes in at least two varieties: good and lazy. Whether or not Otto Jespersen was the first to study the Great Vowel Shift, he certainly coined the term, something you could easily have verified. See for instance The `Great Vowel Shift' again: The evidence of the traditional Northern dialects. Henrik Thiil Nielsen (talk) 23:47, 24 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

He was the one who gave it the name it's now known by, and may have been among the earliest to study it systematically from a linguistic point of view, but I find it extremely difficult to believe that he was the first to notice or discuss it. Almost any Spanish-, Italian-, or German-language speaker in the 18th or 19th centuries who was trying to learn English would have wondered why the heck the letters "a", "e", and "i" often have very strange sound-values in English (at a minimum)... AnonMoos (talk) 08:27, 25 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Great Vowel Shift (bis)

Why don't you here mention his discovery of the laws of the Great Vowel Shift? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

Something may be wrong in the state of Denmark. But what about conditions in Britain and its 'superior' edusys, if this thought doesn't occur to you? 181.214.159.165 (talk) 21:04, 15 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

If anyone is still wondering: The thought of Jespersen's "discovery" of the GVS had indeed occurred to me. "That's strange," I thought (though in mentalese, of course): "It's not true." And I think that AnonMoos would have agreed with me. But the article Great Vowel Shift was indeed perpetuating this myth, until just a few minutes ago, when I corrected it. -- Hoary (talk) 00:00, 2 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

"Essays and articles (selected)"

I'm about to delete the section titled "Essays and articles (selected)". This said (and I quote verbatim):

What is the use of phonetics?, in: Educational Review (February 1910)
Nature and Art in Language, in: American Speech 5 (1929), pp. 89ff (Part 1, Part 2)
Adversative Conjunctions, in: Linguistica (1933)

It seems that what distinguishes the three is that they've been reproduced on one particular website. But now that both Linguistica: Selected papers in English, French and German and Selected writings are available via the Internet Archive, their listing in the article seems superfluous. -- Hoary (talk) 00:07, 24 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Modern structural linguistics

Amire80, fifteen years ago, you wrote that "In the 21st [century, The Philosophy of Grammar] is still used as one of the basic texts in modern Structural linguistics." Do you happen to remember where you read this? -- Hoary (talk) 08:59, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I don't have a written source for this. For what it's worth, lecturers used this book repeatedly when I was doing my Linguistics degree. Today I probably wouldn't write it like this in an article, even though I have reasons to believe that it's true. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 10:18, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the fast response, Amir E. Aharoni. Well, it seems that back in 2010 you were editing in the same, carefree way that I was editing back in 2010. Very naughty of us! -- Hoary (talk) 22:41, 1 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Switch reference style?

The article now uses references that are named when used (or likely to be used) more than once, combined with Template:Rp where appropriate. (I might have been the editor who introduced Rp to the article.)

The resulting "source" is getting rather unwieldy for editing. Template:Sfn (which I normally don't much like) is looking more attractive. Any objections to a switch to Sfn? -- Hoary (talk) 06:54, 7 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Done (though to Template:Sfnp), for the most part. -- Hoary (talk) 09:56, 10 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]